Pete McMartin: Reflecting back on those tiny steps forward that mattered

In the late afternoon, before dinner, we went out on the long lawn and lay beneath the big locust trees. We looked up into the blue sky. His father, who was a good father, pulled the boy close to him and spoke to him as he always did, calling him “peanut,” and the boy, 10 months old, smiled and ran his hands over his father’s face.

Pete McMartin

Updated: August 10, 2016

Two toddlers get a helping hand as they learn to walk in a sandy playground.

In the late afternoon, before dinner, we went out on the long lawn and lay beneath the big locust trees. We looked up into the blue sky. The young father, who was a good father, pulled his baby boy close to him and spoke to him as he always did, calling him “peanut,” and the boy, 10 months old, smiled and ran his hands over his father’s face.

His father stood him up on the grass. He held the boy around his waist until he was steady, then he let go. The boy wavered there for a moment, a shiver of uncertainty passing through him, and then his arms came up like a tightrope walker catching his balance. Where, I wondered, had that instinct come from? How many millennia had it been since that gesture had been hardwired into us and the first of us had chosen to stand upright?

The boy’s uncle, who was with us there on the lawn, walked a few feet away, held out his arms and called to the boy.

C’mon! C’mon! Come to me!

And then the boy took a step — the step where we and he held our breath, the step between falling and not — and he started forward. At the beginning, there was a moment when he looked like he would topple sideways, but he paused and waited the moment out, and then he moved forward again. He padded through the grass on his chubby bare feet, taking quick, herky jerky steps, the same kind, I thought, like an old man who could no longer trust his equilibrium. Grinning, his momentum carrying him across the lawn, he walked into the outstretched arms of his uncle. His uncle, grinning himself now, lifted him up and kissed him on the cheek.

I looked around us. It was a moment that felt as if it needed remembering — the dappled shadows on the lawn, the afternoon light lingering in the treetops, the bay beyond and Mount Baker beyond that, the voices of our wives inside the house as they prepared dinner. The smiles of the boy and his father and uncle. What moments in life do we live for if not for ones like these?

Yet it struck me, looking at them, that I could not remember when and where the boy’s father and uncle had taken their first steps, or what I had felt at the time. Pride, of course, and love, certainly. But what else? Had it been inside or outside? Who else had witnessed it? Had I even been there, or had I been a latecomer to them with their mother telling me what they done after the fact? Yet even she, when asked, said she could not precisely remember those moments. She was sure she had noted the occasions in her baby book — at least, for our first born — but then she let the entries lapse soon after. Life had intruded. She had been too busy, too exhausted from lack of sleep. She wasn’t even sure where the baby book was now.

Memory is a gauzy and oddly functioning thing, for while I have no memory of my children’s first steps or first words — those cinematic milestones of life parents are supposed to remember — I do retain memories of their first years that are as inconsequential as they are inexplicably vivid. My first born son’s terrified at-bat in a Little League game. My second son’s yowls as an emergency room nurse stitched his forehead, split from falling into the corner of my wife’s hope chest. My daughter pirouetting across a beach as I watched from a cottage porch. These memories and others like them have always come unbidden to me. Why they come and why they stay are a mystery.

As I have grown older, though, all the gaps in my memories of them weigh upon me more and more, that as a grandson takes his first steps forward, I ache to go back and reclaim all those years of my own children that I lost to the blur of work and whatever else distracted me at the time. I learned too late, perhaps as we all do, of life’s evanescence.

And as we sat there on the lawn, I wanted to say to my sons, remember this if you can, commit it to memory, because this day and others like it will be all you’ll really want to have kept when you reach my age. Take note of this while you can, I wanted to tell them. And if not, take this.

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